The Internet enables access to an
audience of remarkable diversity, and the opportunity
to provide that audience with an equally diverse
range of materials. Anne
Lancashire's poll of the responses of Shakespeare
scholars to an Internet Edition is revealing in two
ways: the number of replies she received indicates
that there is a real interest in the new way of
accessing information; at the same time, however, the
resources that scholars expect, or would like to see,
are fundamentally the same as those they would like
to find in a printed text, with the addition that the
electronic space would permit greater
comprehensiveness. It is clear from the respondents
that they expect to use an electronic edition as an
adjunct to a regular printed edition rather than a
substitute for it.

Any new venture in a field with as
long a tradition of scholarship as Shakespeare
studies will have to be seen as credible in terms of
that tradition. Editors for the Internet Shakespeare
Editions (ISE) will have to be at least as thorough
in their editorial practices as the editors for the
Arden Shakespeare and its peers; since the electronic
editions of Shakespeare on the Internet thus far are
inaccurate and outdated, and since the medium allows
anyone with access to a server to put anything on
line and call it an edition, the ISE will have to set
up visibly rigorous scholarly standards if the
editions are to receive wide scholarly acceptance.
Thus one crucial component of editions in a new
medium will be their fealty to the older medium and
its standards.

At the same time, an Internet
edition will be a disappointment if all it offers is
more of the same. Ray Siemens,
Don Foster, and Ian Lancashire point to
ways that an electronic edition can extend the text
more than by simply providing what we expect from a
print edition. In the discussion that follows I will
examine both the old and the new: the process by
which an Internet edition can preserve traditional
editorial approaches, and the newer capacities that
the electronic medium makes available to a variety of
readers. Since this essay itself is appearing in the
electronic form, I make a gesture towards the growing
conventions of the medium by including headings of
the kind that are found in most documents posted on
the Internet.

In the print medium, the word
"edition" implies a fairly consistent set
of expectations: the text will be responsive to the
earlier history of publication of the work, and will
provide some kind of scholarly framework, from the
minimum of a preface explaining the provenance of the
text, to the full scholarly apparatus of introduction
and notes. The electronic edition at the moment,
however, covers a far wider range of possibilities.
At one end will be an erratically proofread, scanned
text from a doubtful and outdated source, chosen
because it is out of copyright; Don Foster comments
that even such a leader in the field as
Chadwyck-Healey seems willing to publish seriously
flawed electronic texts.[1]
At the other end of the range of electronic texts
will be the kind of edition offered by the Cambridge
University Press project on The Canterbury Tales,
a CD ROM with deeply encoded text, full scholarly
apparatus, and digitized images of the original
manuscripts.[2]

The ISE aims for something rather
more modest than The Canterbury Tales project,
partly because the medium of the Internet, unlike
that of the CD ROM, has greater limitations both in
the vexed area of copyright, and in the amount of
data that a user is willing to wait for. The Internet
is also a more rapidly evolving and less predictable
medium than a CD ROM, where the editor/designer has
more complete control over the software that is used
to interpret and display the data.

One of the major challenges of any
Internet scholarly edition will be to establish
consistency in a rapidly changing medium, and
credibility in the scholarly world, where the
experience of the uneven quality of those texts that
are on line has justifiably made scholars cautious.
The academic structure of the Internet Shakespeare
Editions follows that of on-line academic journals
like Renaissance Forum and EMLS, which
in turn follow the practices of established print
journals. The ISE has an Editorial Board, members of
which are drawn from a range of interests in the
profession; its mandate is to ensure that all
materials posted on the site are of high quality, and
have undergone adequate peer review.

In one crucial way, however, the ISE
site differs from even an electronic journal in its
structure. An article once published, in print or in
an electronic journal, will not be changed; it is a
fixed artifact, and its readers know that in its
published and final form it has been peer reviewed.
On the ISE site, however, publication of texts is
incremental: parts of editions can be posted as they
are completed, and in order to make the most of the
electronic medium of the Internet, the edition can be
maintained in a way impossible in a fixed medium --
even a CD ROM. After initial publication, editors can
add items to the bibliography; as more resources
become available on the Internet, both within the ISE
site and beyond, additional links can be added; as
scholarship advances on other texts in the series,
and in the burgeoning number of fine editions
currently appearing in print or CD ROM, editors can
add additional references and comments to keep the
edition fully up to date.

In theory, this kind of
"maintained" text can be seen as a
significant improvement on the fixed text we are
accustomed to. The problem is that such a text may be
seen as in some sense insecure; a normal text is
finished, peer reviewed, and date-stamped, with all
its potential incompleteness and imperfection. The
Internet text would appear to have no such assurance
for the reader. Part of the answer is to be found in
the draft document prepared for the MLA Committee On
Scholarly Editions, Guidelines for Electronic
Scholarly Editions, and followed by such pioneers
as the Renaissance Electronic Texts, and the
electronic texts being developed at the University of
Virginia, the University of Alberta, and elsewhere:
each text includes as an integral part a summary of
all revisions and emendations. The scholar is thus
able to see in the one text its layers of revision,
in much the same way as the title-page of a book
which provides a history of its various editions --
though the statement of revision in the electronic
text will in fact be far more detailed than will be
found in a book.[3]

The maintenance of a text can be
made both straightforward and accountable if the
kinds of change are categorized carefully. Some can
be seen as automatic, or trivial; some will require
further peer review before being posted on the site.
An example of automatic revision would be the
inclusion of internal cross-references and links to a
new play as it comes on line; trivial changes would
be of the order of correcting proof errors, or adding
a recent book or article (print or electronic) to the
annotated bibliography. An editor who wished to make
substantive changes either to the text or to its
supporting materials would be expected to go through
the standard process of peer review before the
changes were made.

If the scholar accessing the text
can thus be assured of its integrity, there remains a
related problem for the scholar who is responsible
for the maintenance of the text: that of gaining
institutional credit for the work the maintenance
requires. This is part of a larger question of the
general credibility of scholarship in the electronic
medium, and here again the MLA provides guidance. The
approval processes of the ISE conform with those
recommended in the MLA's Guidelines for Evaluating
Computer-Related Work in the Modern Languages; in
cases where maintenance of the text requires
additional peer review, the materials submitted
should be considered at least the equivalent of a
refereed article; more minor adjustments are likely
to be the result of the normal activity of a scholar
who wishes to remain current with research in the
field.

An Internet edition has the
potential for providing another, important way in
which a scholar can be assured of stability in the
edited text: like a CD ROM, the edition can include
digitized versions of the original quarto and folio
texts. The Internet Shakespeare Editions plan to
provide both encoded transcriptions of the early
texts, and graphic images of them. The only caveat
here is the willingness of libraries to make their
images available over the Internet; thus far the
Furness Library at the University of Pennsylvania has
led the way by putting high quality images of King
Lear and Hamlet from the First Folio on
the Internet.[4] The
Folger Shakespeare Library has recently agreed to a
procedure that will allow some of its images to be
used on the ISE site. The advantage of encoded
transcriptions is that they will be fully searchable
in a number of ways: as well as a normal word search,
the encoding of the texts will make it possible to
search for specific items like speech prefixes,
signatures, stage directions, and so on. The
usefulness of this kind of text is demonstrated by
the work of Don Foster
in this collection of essays, and Ian Lancashire
elsewhere.[5]

While the technology of print has
evolved significantly in the last hundred years, the
actual appearance of books, and the conventions with
associated print editions, have changed very little.
As I look at an Arden 3 edition beside an original
Arden, I notice that the recent edition has a more
modern typeface (and its paper is whiter beside the
venerable pages of the earlier book) but the
organization of the book, and the physical layout of
the page have not significantly changed. The
electronic medium, in contrast, is in a state of
flux. Web browsers are updated almost every year,
each iteration bringing more sophisticated
programming tools to designers; the formats for
digitized graphics, sound, and video are still
evolving; the speed of networks is increasing; and
the computers we use to view the data are still
developing with a speed that is either exciting or
irritating, depending on one's geek quotient and bank
balance. The challenge in the design of a site that
offers multimedia scholarship is to ensure that the
data do not become out of date as the medium evolves.

The best defence against
obsolescence in the text itself is the use of a
system of encoding text that is independent of
computer platform or software. The native language of
the Internet, HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is one
example: thus, for example, text is marked
<I>italic</I> and it is left to the
browser and the machine to figure out how to display
italic text. The ISE is using a fuller tag set that
defines more than the simple display tags of HTML;
information concerning textual variants, special
characters, and some functions of the language (stage
direction, speech prefix, etc.) are tagged as well.[6] In order to display
the text on a browser, the richer tag set of the ISE
is translated into HTML; thus as the medium evolves,
the basic text can remain unchanged, and the process
of translation modified to take advantage of new
features as they become available.

The computer has changed the way
most of us work -- certainly those who read EMLS
will be using computers for word processing and
e-mail, and perhaps for some research activities. But
the responses garnered by
Anne Lancashire suggest clearly that scholars see
the electronic text primarily as an opportunity to
improve the speed and convenience of performing the
tasks they are accustomed to, rather than as a means
of doing something different.[7]Ian
Lancashire points out that the Internet makes the
text available to a far wider audience, one that may
be more interested in simple explanation, or the
nature of Shakespeare as a person rather than as a
writer, and suggests that the ISE texts can provide
this audience both with the materials it wants, and
the opportunity to go beyond them. Ray Siemens and Don Foster point to the
potential of new kinds of approaches to Shakespeare,
involving techniques that could perhaps be
accomplished with standard glossaries and
concordances, but which would require the expenditure
of so many hours that they would certainly not become
a convenient way of reading the texts.

Only time, and the provision of new
textual tools, will tell whether the computer will
actually change our experience of the Shakespeare
texts. For a surprisingly long time even in the
sciences, the computer was simply an adjunct to
established methods of research. The recent explosion
of the fields of the various branches of fractal
mathematics ("chaos" theory), however,
demonstrate that the computer has done more than
speed up existing research; it has made possible a
fundamentally different way of perceiving the
universe around us. In an entertaining paradox,
fractal mathematicians are claiming an astonishing
universality ("Why earthquakes are like
businesses are like magnets are like flocks of birds
are like bacteria are like traffic jams are like
ants..."[8]) while
those in the Humanities are busy demolishing
long-cherished concepts of universality in
literature. The point here is not that Humanist
scholars are likely to find that the computer
restores the concept of universality in Shakespeare's
texts, but that the physics of universality in
critical systems could not have been explored -- or
even imagined -- without the computer's
number-crunching power. The experience in the
sciences warns us that we may have no idea at all of
the kinds of research or teaching that will be
carried out with the use of electronic texts twenty
years from now.

While we wait for the
word-crunchers to reveal new ways of reading
Shakespeare, there are some important ways that an
Internet edition can exploit the specific milieu of
the Internet to its advantage. Internet users are
very different from the readers of books. They like
to chat, they don't like to read much on screen, and
they don't like to feel lost in a maze of links.

The admirable urge of Internet
browsers to chat and to contribute to a forum can be
harnessed without compromising the principles of peer
review and the integrity of the text: the key is to
label the sections of the site clearly. The ISE uses
the metaphor of a traditional library: the
"Foyer" offers discussions of principles
and the guidelines which the editions follow; the
"Library" itself will contain only refereed
materials; and there is an "Annex," a kind
of electronic cafeteria, where those who visit the
site can leave comments, and where un-refereed, but
interesting, materials can be posted. At present the
Annex provides twelve draft transcriptions of
original Quarto and Folio texts, some articles on
electronic Shakespeare, a digest of some earlier
discussion about the design of the site, and a
text-only "jumplist" of other sites of
interest to Shakespeare scholars. As the editions are
developed, the Annex will allow a fuller conversation
about issues raised by individual editors. It is not
intended to become a discussion group of the kind
exemplified by FICINO, HUMANIST or SHAKSPER, but it
will use creatively the desire of those who use the
Internet to share their opinions.

The cost of connect time, and the
inconvenience of reading from a screen, mean that
most Internetters are "hit and run"
readers: they want to find something, download it,
and move on or disconnect. Thus the ISE site should
be easy to navigate, and provide a variety of ways of
searching for specific -- or vague -- information.
Basing the data structure of the site on a powerful
database software from Oracle[9] will allow for a variety of kinds
of searches (act.scene.line of the
Riverside/Bevington/Hinman editions; occurrences of
"love" and "death" within five
lines; feminist approaches to Cymbeline); the
software also provides the capacity for
"fuzzy" searches; the fuzzy search has the
potential to restore to the rigid binary world of the
computer some of the serendipity we all relish as we
browse the stacks of a library looking for something
in particular, only to find something delightfully
different and satisfying.

Ian Lancashire points out
that the actual audience of Internet editions range from the marginally
curious general browser to the serious scholar using the power of machine-readable
text for new kinds of research. The materials that can be made available
range from the modern, annotated text itself, to graphic reproductions of
original texts and digitized performance materials in graphic and video
formats. It is one of the particular talents of the computer that it can
provide an almost limitless capacity for choice, so that theoretically a
site could respond to the needs of widely different users. The concomitant
danger, however, is that the range of alternatives will be confusing; the
wide appeal of Shakespeare makes it desirable that the ISE should provide
choice for its viewers, but there will inevitably have to be careful management
of navigational aids through the editions, and some degree of limitation
in the range of choice available if the site is to succeed.

Careful design can exploit fully
the power of the computer and machine-readable text,
without the process becoming daunting. Default
display can be designed to satisfy the most requested
formats: not every user will want to see the text of Othello
with variant readings from Quarto and Folio
highlighted in different colours, as in a sample page
on the ISE site,[10]
but the choice should be available for a user who
clicks on a link to access a variety of different
types of display. The encoding for the ISE texts
includes the provision for the editor to include
three levels of annotation: basic explanations (think
Bevington or Signet), full scholarly discussion
(think Arden, Oxford, or New Cambridge), and
hypertextually linked further exploration of cruxes,
rather like the appendixes to some of the Arden
editions.

As the Internet expands, and offers
increasing numbers of quality sites, the ISE texts
can be linked to resources outside the site itself.
The challenges here are twofold: to monitor the
external sites to ensure that they are stable, and to
make some kind of evaluation of their quality so that
the user will not be invited to link to a site that
is unreliable in its scholarship -- or will be warned
of its limitations in advance. Increasingly, the
first problem can be monitored automatically, with
"robot" programs that check all links to
see if they are valid. The issue of quality is less
easy to resolve; one solution might be for the editor
of a play to provide a kind of Michelin rating
system, indicated by colour or icon.

The potentially bewildering mass of
supporting materials (sources, criticism, performance
records, collation, glossary, bibliography,
transcripts of original texts) can be made manageable
by providing a relatively uncluttered modern text as
a starting point, with all links to further material
to be made from there. The increasingly familiar
convention of icons to signal additional resources
can leave the text even of the notes straightforward;
thus links to the Collation, Shakespeare's sources,
and to performance materials can be signaled
unobtrusively.

The development and maintenance of
an archive of performances of Shakespeare is another
area where the ISE will be exploring the new-fangled.
A full discussion of the process for acquiring these
materials, and for their assessment is beyond this
paper; it is an area, however, that promises to
distinguish the ISE texts substantially from both
print and CD ROM editions of the plays. Though it
will take some time for the archive to be of
sufficient inclusiveness to be useful, it will in due
course provide raw material for critical and cultural
studies of changing trends in production, and has the
potential for changing the kinds of assignments we
can ask of our students.

The main obstacle for the ISE to
overcome in this area is the Byzantine complexity of
copyright law on the Internet.[11] Until the question of "fair
use" has been settled, the ISE will not be
posting video clips of movies; rather the site will
cooperate with major festivals to develop the
performance database and to update it annually. The
database will include various kinds of graphic
materials: director's production notes, prompt book
excerpts, costume and set designs, photographs of the
production, principles of casting, type of space
used, video segments from the play (where available),
and information about sound effects and music.[12]

Perhaps the greatest initial
challenge to the editors and those using the Internet
editions will be to exploit the capacity of hypertext
to its fullest. Paul Werstine
shows how a general editorial issue can be elegantly
illustrated by directly linking the discussion to the
examples it refers to. As scholars, we are accustomed
to the discipline of linear argument; as writers of
hypertext we have the opportunity to explore the
multilinearity we theorize about but seldom practice
except perhaps in a graduate seminar or the bar at a
conference.

A further challenge, as Ray Siemens suggests,
will be for scholars to become "dynamic"
readers of Shakespeare and the associated texts. This
will involve becoming accustomed to the ways of
viewing the text that the computer makes not only
possible but increasingly intuitive as the Internet
interface becomes more flexible, and as we become
familiar with the new tools for the analysis of text
that are being developed. Fifteen short years ago,
word processing was an arcane activity requiring the
mastery of a complex "command line" syntax
which generated frequent intimidating error messages
from the computer, and equally curious
"dot" commands that instructed the output
device on the very basic formatting that was
available. Now we are accustomed to working on a
screen that directly imitates the page we plan to
print to, and the commands have been reduced to the
simplicity of a mouse click on an icon or menu
choice. In the same way, text analysis programs are
beginning to move beyond the stage of requiring a
resident guru to implement and design the commands
needed. As tools of this kind become available for
use over the Internet, they will be included as a
part of the ISE site, at which time the kinds of
research currently being pursued by Ian Lancashire
and Don Foster will become more widely used and
integrated into other kinds of research.

An electronic edition has two
potentially conflicting aims: to remain faithful to
the well-established traditions of the discipline,
and to forge new tools and ways of conceiving the
text it preserves. If this sounds like a paradox, it
is a familiar one. A logo for the ISE might be the
familiar emblem of the dolphin and anchor,
"festina lente," as we make haste slowly
towards the full realization of an Internet
Shakespeare.[13]

[1] On the subject of accuracy in
preparing electronic texts, the MLA Guidelines
comment:

One very reliable method of manual transcription
for printed materials is to input the same text
twice, by two different people, who do not
necessarily have to know the language involved, then
use a collation or file compare program to find the
differences. (Faulhaber, section I.C.4)

The experience of Foster, however, suggests
that this method is more fallible than might be expected, since the Chadwyck-Healey
texts are prepared by this technique.

The technique of double-keying employed by
Chadwyck-Healey comes under scrutiny of a different --
though related -- kind from Paul Werstine, who echoes a
concern voiced in discussions on HUMANIST. In a passage
from his original paper, he commented:

If we are to link any great number of digitized
texts of English dramatic manuscripts to digitized
early printed texts, we will have to depend on the
Chadwyck-Healey archive, which has been purchased by
my university and many others, and in using
Chadwyck-Healey, I would suggest, we sink into an
ethical and textual morass. The Chadwyck-Healey
texts, I've been told, came into being under
despicable socio-economic conditions, the data entry,
in the euphemisms of Harris-speak and Bank CEO
jargon, being outsourced to offshore companies for
double-keying.

Unpacked, this language means that Asian labour
was paid a negligible wage under unspeakable working
conditions so that we can use the results in our
computers. But the method of double-keying does not
produce texts with the reliability of either the
scholarly edition or the facsimile. What's more, for
dramatic manuscripts, Chadwyck-Healey used already
mediated Malone Society reprints, some of which have
themselves been shown to be textually quite
unreliable, largely because the Society's first
secretary refused to leave London to verify
transcriptions of manuscripts housed elsewhere. It is
hard to see how anything we might idealize as truth
could be reared on the foundations Chadwyck-Healey
offers.

[2] "The Canterbury Tales
Project from Cambridge University Press will make
available in an electronic form, over a ten-year period,
full transcriptions of the text of every manuscript and
pre-1500 printed edition of Chaucer's Canterbury
Tales, together with digitized images of every page
of every manuscript and early edition, collations of all
these texts, and analyses of the textual tradition based
on the transcriptions." Cited from http://www.cup.org/Chaucer/ctpbl
urb.html. [Back]

[3] A good example of this kind of
accountability is the practice of many
"shareware" software programs that provide a
detailed history of enhancements and bug fixes. ISE
editions will maintain a list of this kind as a separate
page, from which users can access the latest materials.
Since CD ROM versions of selected texts will be issued by
the University of Toronto Press, this page will become a
reference point for those using the CD in keeping it up
to date. [Back]

[4] See the University of
Pennsylvania's Center for Electronic Text and Image, http://www.library.upenn.edu/etext/.
Michael T. Ryan writes that the library "certainly
will be doing more facsimiles from the FF" in the
future. (Private e-mail of 1 December 1997.) [Back]

[5] Ray Siemens' article cites
several studies by Lancashire
and Foster that
exemplify the kind of research that the electronic text
makes possible; Foster's contribution to this collection
is a further example. [Back]

[6] In establishing its tag set, the
ISE is again following the recommendation of the MLA Guidelines
in using SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) in a
form compatible with the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI).
See Faulhaber (ed., section I.A.B). The current
development of eXtensible Markup Language (XML) from SGML
may well provide more powerful means of viewing the texts
and materials on the site. See also Rifkin. [Back]

[7] Though Anne Lancashire's survey was explicitly aimed
at scholars, it is almost certainly true that our students will be equally
conservative, despite the fact that in many cases they will be more computer-comfortable,
if not more computer-literate, than current Shakespeare scholars. In two
courses I teach partly on-line,
I ask my students to become familiar with the research resources for Shakespeare
studies that are currently available on the Internet; as a part of the assignment
I ask them what materials they did not find. The list,
though less formal than a survey, is revealing: they looked for study aids
(plot summaries, character sketches, and so on), and for criticism of the
plays. Once again, they seek the kinds of literary materials they are familiar
with. It is worth noting that students give much higher priority to supporting
critical materials than the scholars in
Lancashire's survey. [Back]

[8] "One Law to Rule Them
All," New Scientist 156:2107 (8 November,
1997): 30-35 (cited from the cover page summary of the
article). [Back]

[9] "ConText provides many
powerful text retrieval features. In addition to exact
word searches, ConText handles: stemming, to match
plurals, past tenses, and other alternate forms of words;
fuzzy-match and sounds-like, to match misspelled words
and other 'close' words; and synonyms. ConText also
provides advanced linguistic capabilities that can
actually analyze the content of a document, producing
'themes' and 'gists'. Themes are words or short phrases
that represent the main concepts in a document, while a
gist is a collection of the most important paragraphs in
a document." ("Leveraging the Oracle ConText
Option In Your Web Applications," Oracle
Developer's Programme Newsletter, December/January
1997.) For general information on Oracle software, see
their site at www.oracle.com.
[Back]

[11] At the time of writing this
article, a bill under consideration by the US Congress
would bring some reasonable order to the field (see the
announcement by the National Initiative for a Networked
Cultural Heritage [NINCH], September 17, 1997, reported
in HUMANIST Vol. 11, No. 408, November 17, 1997). A
useful gateway to discussions about copyright is
"Copyright and Fair Use," Stanford University, http://fairuse.stanford.edu/.
NINCH maintains an excellent page at http://www-ninch.cni.org/.
[Back]

[13] The emblem and its
passage of commentary can be viewed on the fine site at
Memorial University: http://www.mun.ca/alciato/.
Even more appropriate might be the illustration of the
motto that appears in Geoffrey Whitney's Choice of
Emblemes (Leiden, 1586; see http://www.mun.ca/alciato/whit/w121.html),
where the same paradox is figured by a crab and a
butterfly, creatures of different elements. I am not, of
course, suggesting that traditional scholarship is
crabby, electronic scholarship flighty. Both
illustrations are provided to the site by courtesy of
Glasgow University Library. Quoted with permission. [Back]